


An Atlas of the Sacred and Profane

by anomieow



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Age Difference, Anatomy, Bets & Wagers, Biting, Dirty Talk, Foreshadowing, Hand Jobs, Kissing, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Oral Sex, Power Struggle, Rimming, Teasing, Underage sex work (referenced)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:01:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24905764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomieow/pseuds/anomieow
Summary: Hickey’s waist is pure, fevered sinew under his palms; the hard neat planes of his torso blaze through the cloth of his undershirt. He’s a quick and savage grasping thing, like a little grassfire. Colored, too, like a pale field burning: in some light he appears as pallid as dried grass, in others vital as pulling flame. Slowly he backs up against the table, pulling MacDonald with him. His teeth are bared in what MacDonald supposes to be a smile, and indeed there’s a beckoning, genial glint in his eyes. And when he speaks, there’s nothing coquettish about his tone, nothing teasing—only that little lilt to his voice that MacDonald can never decode, a stilted and subtle musicality that feels sometimes out of sync with the intent of his words. (This, too, MacDonald mentally tots down.) “What now then, doctor?”
Relationships: Cornelius Hickey/Dr Alexander McDonald, William Gibson/Cornelius Hickey
Comments: 14
Kudos: 27





	1. Chapter 1

MacDonald hadn’t planned to actually loan out the book. Not his Bourgery. He’d suggested it in keeping with the tone of flimsy pretense with which Hickey seemed to be inquiring, and had assumed that when the time came the theoretical reason for Hickey’s presence in the sick bay would be forgotten. Not so. Oh, his Bourgery. Endbands frayed, fore edge worn soft and gray by innumerable thumbings-through, flyleaf stained and lightly warped by spilled tea. It was a matter of integrity now that he lend it to the lad, who’d arrived at the arranged time intending, apparently, to borrow the book _and_ become more acquainted with the doctor who intended to loan it to him. Now the book’s faded scarlet spine peeps out at him from the dark, stale folds of Hickey’s coat as it lies rumpled in the hammock. Well. He returns his focus to the matter at hand.

Hickey’s waist is pure, fevered sinew under his palms; the hard neat planes of his torso blaze through the cloth of his undershirt. He’s a quick and savage grasping thing, like a little grassfire. Colored, too, like a pale field burning: in some light he appears as pallid as dried grass, in others vital as pulling flame. Slowly he backs up against the table, pulling MacDonald with him. His teeth are bared in what MacDonald supposes to be a smile, and indeed there’s a beckoning, genial glint in his eyes. And when he speaks, there’s nothing coquettish about his tone, nothing teasing—only that little lilt to his voice that MacDonald can never decode, a stilted and subtle musicality that feels sometimes out of sync with the intent of his words. (This, too, MacDonald mentally tots down.) “What now then, doctor?”

He’d no more expected Hickey to take him up on his offer to “come by” to borrow an atlas of anatomy than he believed that the caulker’s mate’s true reason for inquiring after the topic in the first place was a purely academic one. He’d read Hickey from day one—or, rather, they’d read one another, recognizing almost instantaneously certain mutual predilections generally best left undiscussed. But then Hickey, as a consequence—MacDonald guesses, anyway; he really has no feel for the young man except the gut understanding that he must not be trusted nor let have his way in anything—has developed this way of fixing him with a lingering, enquiring stare, as though he were waiting for MacDonald to answer a question he’d not asked. Not that they crossed paths often: hale to begin with and careful to avoid overexertion in work, Hickey rarely needed visit the sick bay. Come to think of it, MacDonald could count on one hand the number of times they’d spoken prior to tonight. But each time he’d been met with this gaze, its intimacy and persistence, and of course he’d returned it. Same for same—at least, as discretion allowed. Young men may do what they want, especially those that have never been lashed for it, but MacDonald knows better and has a hatchwork of pale, faintly raised scars across his shoulders to prove it. 

Now, strapping lads were generally more MacDonald’s taste, all breadth and grinning, with shoulders you could hitch a plow to. He cared little for skinniness, less for insolence—except perhaps for the rather harrowing pleasure that might be taken in correcting it—but Hickey, who was scrappy and sly both, possessed a magnetism that drew MacDonald’s attention. And such a frisson crackled between them each time they met MacDonald was astonished no one else perceived it. It seemed to charge the air between them, send ripples through the room. It did not distract MacDonald, though he was acutely aware of it, nor did he think of Hickey when he was not around—not much, anyway. Once or twice he’d summoned that face in the grainy dark of his mind’s eye as he took himself in hand, gray blue eyes glittering in that knowing, proud way from between his thighs, that sharp tongue stoppered—

—well, never mind that. Now he’s here, waiting. His diminutive body tense with impatience. MacDonald draws a deep breath and closes the space between them, laying one hand on the younger man’s hip and the other on the back of his neck, and bows his head for a kiss. Hickey’s parts his lips, but otherwise slouches inert in the taller man’s arms: he’s going to make MacDonald work for it. Good. It is always a pleasure, a challenge. He sums the little he knows of Hickey in his head—the side-alley accent and the feline stealth, how adroitly he dodges questions about himself, how he holds eye contact like it’s a pissing contest—and takes a calculated gamble. He gathers a fistful of fine red hair in his fist and twists; his hand glides around to the small of his back and down to roughly cup the flesh of his ass in his palm. Digs his nails in. Hickey stiffens in his arms, seizes MacDonald’s lip in his teeth, and savagely tugs. Breaks skin, the feral bastard. MacDonald shakes his head to pull free. Hickey’s eyes are softly widened and blaze with something MacDonald can’t decipher. A beckoning blaze, anyway—was a sound gamble, then. 

Then Hickey’s mouth is back on his. His way of kissing brutal but deliberate, scraping his teeth against MacDonald’s tongue as he works the tip of it with his own tongue as though it were a little cock: sucking, darting, deftly twisting around it. The thought of what he could do with the real thing pulls a low moan from his throat and he feels Hickey’s lips twist into something like both a smile and a snarl. Then the younger man’s hands are at his waist, slender fingers seeking his prick. With a sharp parting nip of his own, MacDonald breaks the kiss, slides his hands around to the outside of Hickey’s thighs, and with a small grunt lifts him onto the table. Then he plants his hands on either side of Hickey’s hips and leans down so that his waist his just out of reach. Pinning Hickey’s hands in place with his own, he asks pleasantly, “what’s your hurry?”

“Maybe I’ve somewhere to be,” Hickey says haughtily.

MacDonald steps back, smiling. “Go there, then.” There’s no hardness in his voice, no sharpness. “Don’t forget the book there—please do take care of it.” 

Hickey crosses the room and extricates the book from his coat. He returns to stand before MacDonald and begins to flip through the book. “Tell me, doctor,” he asks, distracted, “do you find the body sacred or profane?” 

MacDonald would love to answer that question: something about how the body sacred and the body profane are two manifestations of the same divine form, or even just something ribald about which Hickey would prefer then and there. But Hickey’s merely said what he’s said because he thinks it’s clever, and MacDonald has no interest in engaging his ego. Instead, he points at the image on the page, a finely-striated delta of red flesh fanning out from the fulcrum of the shoulder toward neck and shoulder blade. “The trapezius muscle,” he says. Then he steps behind Hickey and slides his finger along his neck before, in one swift motion, tugging the worn white cotton of the younger man’s collar from his neck and dropping his mouth onto the rounded ridge of muscle there. Bites hard. Hickey arches his back with a gasp—his ass pressing against MacDonald’s groin as effortlessly as water brooks a shore—and his hands fly behind him onto MacDonald’s hips. 

“What else do you know, doctor?”

“I’m... a doctor,” he answers, amused, against Hickey’s heated flesh. “It’s my job to know the contents of that book like the back of my hand.”

“Could you name each muscle, then? Every bone?” 

“I’d wager I could, Mr. Hickey,” MacDonald answers proudly before pressing his lips against where he’s bitten, licking and sucking. 

“And what exactly would you wager?” Hickey asks, pressing himself fully into MacDonald’s slowly-awakening prick. There’s a trace of a shakiness to Hickey’s voice that stirs him just as the self-satisfied way in which he stretches against him—like a spoilt housecat stretching—galls him.

MacDonald slides his own hand around front and is surprised to find Hickey fully hard. “I’m game,” MacDonald says, his tone indulgent. “The terms are yours to name.”

Hickey gasps as MacDonald makes a coordinated pass with with his fist and teeth. “Give me a moment to think,” he grumbles. “What’s your hurry?”


	2. Chapter 2

A mere twenty minutes later, lying on his back with Hickey’s nimble tongue working the tender juncture of jaw and neck—that is, where his _tonsillar node_ lies, an answer Hickey had grudgingly accepted per the rules of their “game”—and his hand playing idly about in trousers he can’t recall being unbuttoned, MacDonald realizes that he’s let the situation get out of hand. 

“What’s this?” Hickey asks in a tone of nonchalant curiosity as he grazes his callused fingertip over the head of MacDonald’s prick. MacDonald swears he can feel, as Hickey speaks, his breath eddying over his skin, up behind the shell of his ear and runnelling down his neck, a stain with discrete borders. His whole body’s charged, his entire—here’s another word he could give to Hickey but he holds it under his tongue, a secret for the sake of secrecy—somatosensory system is sharp with readiness. And awake with hunger. But his mind’s a soft, hot haze of half-recalled words.

“That’s my cock, you little prick,” he mutters, sitting up.

“No,” Hickey grins, withdrawing his hand—fingers sticky with pre-ejaculate—and sitting up to thumb through the pages of the book lying on MacDonald’s chest. “That, doctor, is your glans.” He sounds half-triumphant and half... MacDonald must cast about for it, for its something he’s often heard in his voice and never been able to name, but now it comes to him exact and whole: he’s half asking for a pat on the head, the lad is. Nosing around for someone to tell him not just that he’s clever, but that it’s pleasing that he is, that he’s valued for it. In short, he wants to be told that he is good. 

“Good,” MacDonald says. “But you already knew that. Didn’t even look down at the book.” Hickey’s giving him that look again like they share a lovely and important secret, all shining eyes and lips quirked in a small smile, but doesn’t say anything. So MacDonald goes on—another calculated gamble, a feeling-out—“But you seem to know, I daresay, a fair bit about cock already.”

“I might.” Something shifts in his eyes, flashes wolf-like. “Enough, I bet, to get you begging like a dog. But what about you, doctor? What do you know? I’ve not yet got you shaped out.”

“Good,” MacDonald returns mildly. “I prefer it that way. I believe we are alike in that respect, no?” He’s got his head about him again but the lust, that stupefying fever that Hickey inexplicably provokes in him, is unabated. It’s the kind of clamoring, bruising want that hasn’t possessed him since he was a lad himself, and Christ, he’d been made to suffer for it then. In dreams sometimes the scars still open painlessly, bloodlessly, like fissures in ice. So it unnerves him to feel so giddy and compelled, just as any unexpected stimuli unnerves him, but he’s also over-brimming glad for it. That, were he ever forced to explain in brief, is the kind of man he is. 

“Our wager,” Hickey reminds him with that funny wiggle of his head that seems his alone. “Where were we?”

“You remember,” MacDonald scolds gently, lying back down and pulling Hickey with him. It takes a moment of clumsy maneuvering but then Hickey’s straddling him on the exam table, pressing his thighs against his hips. MacDonald lays his hands on those thighs, finding them slender but muscular. Christ, to see this lad fully nude—to discover with eye and palm and tongue if he’s as elegantly muscled as it feels through the loose, coarse cloth of his clothes. 

“Take off your shirt,” he says. His voice is soft, but it is unmistakably an order. Hickey hesitates a moment, torn perhaps between his impulse toward disobedience and his need to be admired. But then he’s pulling the dingy white shirt over his head, casually, like he’s undressing alone. The body beneath is one sculpted by grunt labor and privation, full hard musculature tacked onto an undernourished frame. MacDonald has—and ignores—an absurd urge to take Hickey into his arms, enfold him there, ear and cheek against his hammering heart. “Now take up the book,” he says instead, sitting up, “and we’ll settle this.” 

Then he presses his lips against Hickey’s collar. “Clavicle,” he murmurs before nipping at what he knows to be sensitive flesh on any man, thin over the bone. They both already know this one, Hickey having left a bite to bloom into a bruise on MacDonald’s own just minutes earlier, for which he’d been roundly scolded. _You’ll not mark me up,_ MacDonald had said, to which Hickey had replied, _Mark me as you’d like,_ as though it were a point of academic contention. Now MacDonald puts this declaration to the test, seizing a bit of the flesh between his teeth and sucking hard, only to be rewarded indeed by Hickey gasping in a lovely strangled kind of way. 

“You don’t strike me as one who’d bear well the marks of another,” MacDonald says distractedly. 

Hickey cups the back of MacDonald’s skull in his hand, tangles his fingers in his hair, and pulls his head back painfully so that he can look down into his eyes. “You leave it to me what I’ll bear and not bear,” he says with a cold softness, “and keep your mouth busy.”

Something wicked surges up in MacDonald and he seizes one of Hickey’s nipples between thumb and crook of his forefinger and twists. Whether he means it as a corrective action or further pleasure, he’s not even sure, but Hickey loosens his grip in his hair at once and jerks his hips against him with a low, raw moan. He maneuvers MacDonald’s mouth to that same nipple. “Now suck,” he says, his voice hard and small.

“The book, Mr. Hickey,” MacDonald teases, making sure the breath that bears each word breaks softly against Hickey’s sensitive chest like surf tide as with his thumbnail he flicks the other nipple to hardness. “Our wager.”

“—Bugger the book and bugger the wager and bugger you, you filthy old fuck.”

“ _I’m_ filthy, am I? I’ve never nearly sprung in my unders from getting pinched and bitten. And if I did I certainly wouldn’t add insult to embarrassment running my nasty little brat mouth about it—not unless I wanted that mouth stuffed up. I’d keep quiet and take what I had coming to me.” All this he delivers in an even, genial tone, as though explaining to a patient how to care for a wound. But his blood is roaring in his ears, scalding his cheeks like sunburn. Thank Christ he can keep outwardly composed, and it’s with steady hands that he unbuttons Hickey’s trousers and his own. Then he rises onto his knees, lays Hickey on his back, and leans over him, bracketing his head with his braced arm on one side and with then other working Hickey’s rigid prick loose from his trousers. His own is revived partway by realizing how hard Hickey’s is, eager and flushed. But Hickey lies still and quiet; his eyes are hard. He doesn’t stop MacDonald; he doesn’t retort neither does he push him away. MacDonald can feel rage in the rigidity of his limbs, sees white blanching the elegant knuckles of Hickey’s curled fists, and he’s sorry for it. But Hickey will not be good unless he’s made to be, and then however will he get what he truly wants? That scratch behind the ear, the fond pat on the head? 

MacDonald lowers his mouth to Hickey’s ear. “Do you understand?” he asks in a sharp whisper. 

Hickey nods. A vague smile dances on his lips but his eyes are—empty, somehow. MacDonald realizes that he’s never before seen Hickey expressionless and yet this is a calculated concealment; he’s tucked himself away within himself in an exertion of self-control of which MacDonald had not thought him capable. _He is capable of a great many things,_ MacDonald realizes with a lurch in his gut, _that you’ve not even begun to comprehend_. Suddenly there’s a new fear in him, anxiety as chill and slender as a knife’s blade, but absurdly it only inflames him, revives with a vengeance the delirium of lust that had so seized him earlier. At that exact moment Hickey wraps his arms around him, crushing him to him with more strength than such a stripling of a man should possess. His hands, his quick little fingers, dance and dig along his back. 

“Oh-o,” he breathes slyly, feeling out through the cloth the thickest of the scars from MacDonald’s scars. Slug-shaped, pinky-width, it was the one of all the lashes that hadn’t healed neatly like the rest. Its reddish blotching edge had spread outward in threads like threads from the eye of a spiderweb, and he’d run a fever. He was assiduously but in complete silence cared for by the scowling cook aboard the small whaler, who followed his instructions exact and no more. The old man seemed to shrink back when he touched him, as though the transgression for which he’d been lashed might spread like contagion. But he listened well and tended to him, and he’d gradually healed.

Now MacDonald fights the urge to disentangle himself from Hickey, send him away. He sets his jaw and wills himself to take a deep breath. 

“What’s this from?” Hickey asks with lazy curiosity.

“You know what it’s from,” MacDonald answers, then gives a surprised little whine as Hickey closes his fist around the flesh of his back, digging his nails in. The scars themselves are insensate but the flesh between them is exquisitely tender, and sings now with a pleasure that chills and scalds at once. With a ragged moan MacDonald presses his shoulders up into Hickey’s hands and lets dangle his head, his eyes closed. Hickey’s got his legs hooked now around MacDonald’s hips and their cocks grind drily against each other as they move. It’s more pressure than pleasure so Hickey takes his hand from MacDonald’s back, spits in his palm, and works his way down, slicking up both their pricks with just enough to send little shivering echoes of pleasure up through them but not enough to spend from. Then his hand is back on the valley of old scars between MacDonald’s shoulders, kneading and digging in, and his mouth is on his chest, nipping and sucking. He is pure sensation for a few moments, jarred free of himself, distilled down to the pains and graces of his body. But his eyes, when he opens them, are clear. 

Hickey is evidently getting more out of the grinding friction between their cocks than MacDonald is, for now he lets his head fall back, eyes still bright—gaze still sharp—from beneath lowering lids. But his smile has gone nearly... goofy, somehow, a glad and open one, and inviting. His teeth softly parted. MacDonald sticks his fingers in that pretty open mouth and is rewarded with the same kind of flurry of quick nipping and sucking that he’d visited on the top of his tongue.

“Christ,” MacDonald says, his voice low and husky, “I bet you’re a magnificent cock sucker.” He withdraws his fingers from Hickey’s mouth spit-slicked, and spreads it over their cocks, dandling his fingers over and between their heads, his palm dragging behind. He’s not yet striving for any specific reaction but at the brush of his thumb, a bit of sticky fluid pulses from the head Hickey’s cock. 

“Is that true?” MacDonald continues, running his fingers lightly up and down Hickey’s shaft. He can’t quite get a good grasp at the angle but it’s enough, Hickey’s breath is quickening to harsh little pants and his gaze is softening, growing shallow. 

He nods, locking eyes with MacDonald. Still a shrewd glint there, a slyness that (for some reason he can’t begin to explain) he feels in his cock. “Do you think about that, doctor? When you’re alone?” Hickey pants. “Do you imagine my mouth on that big dirty cock if yours?”

MacDonald drops onto his elbow so his breath brushes along Hickey’s ear as he speaks. “I imagine choking you with it,” he says, enunciating each word. 

Then he seizes the shell of Hickey’s ear in his teeth, licking what he can’t bite, and then Hickey is grinding hard and quick against him, his nails biting crimson crescent moons—MacDonald can feel it—in the fair flesh of his scarred back. “You filthy fucking bastard,” Hickey is half-panting, half-whimpering into his collar, “you filthy fucking filthy old bastard.”

MacDonald’s dimly, distantly aware that he should be offended, feel ashamed. But instead this scattering of invective goes straight to his cock, electrifying him. “Touch me,” he says sternly, and without hesitation Hickey’s other hand is off his shoulders and wrapped around his shaft, jerking up and down greedily. It’s a vision: usually so sly and calculating and composed, Hickey’s lying beneath him, face slack and unguarded with ecstasy, head lolling to the side, his own eager cock in one hand, MacDonald’s in the other. It is nearly unendurable. Were it not for the lack of lubrication he’d have spent already but as it is he’s able to draw it out, to gaze. Hickey opens his eyes and looks at MacDonald. His gaze is soft, his irises darkened to the color of steel in the low light. The planes of his body blaze gold, and his tongue works his upper lip. “Look at you,” MacDonald breathes without even meaning to. “Look how good you are, how magnificent.”

Hickey’s rhythm stutters and then he’s gone, his panting breath splintering apart into a staccato of moaning and whimpering as he spends. Two, three, four arcing spurts, each diminishing in distance. He closes his eyes: savoring. Then he opens them again, the depth and cunning returning to his gaze, but there’s nothing—dangerous there. Not quite affection, but a sharp and kindly curiosity. He laves MacDonald’s cock—still hard—with his own spend and resumes his work. He’s more deliberate now, and crueler—alternating choking-tight strokes with feather-light until MacDonald’s humping against his fist, mind stripped of everything but the need to spend. This, too, is good; Christ, and terrible. “You bastard,” MacDonald gasps. “Let me—for Christ’s sake—please—“

“Didn’t I say I could make you beg?” Hickey grins, wolf-like. But he does what he’s been begged to do, sliding his other hand beneath MacDonald’s collar as he does so, fingering the scars flesh-to-flesh for the first time. The broken skin sings. MacDonald lets his eyes close and rides the widening song down his spine, through his core, out his exhausted cock. Hickey slows then stops, and waits silently until MacDonald’s done. He lets his head lie on Hickey’s chest for a few moments, his eyes still closed. To hell with him if he can’t give him this little rest. Only slowly does he realize Hickey is still stroking his scars, lightly, like things beloved.


	3. Chapter 3

MacDonald spent the days following their encounter admonishing himself for what he and Hickey had done. It was, he told himself, a moment of weakness not to be repeated. Hickey was, he concluded, too volatile, too sly, his cruel streak too pronounced. He could no more be trusted than the sun might be trusted to rise in the west. To make oneself nakedly known to such a man—worse, to have one’s transgressions, though shared, nakedly known—no. Never again. And MacDonald believed himself firm in his resolve, he truly did. He even congratulated himself on his mastery over his body’s frailties. So proud, he was. Ah, well. He can’t help a small smile as he drags his fingertips along Hickey’s jaw to his carotid, feeling for the faint, rapid beat of the blood that runs there. Hickey tips his face upward at MacDonald, eyes narrowing incrementally, like a pleased cat.

“Something funny, doctor?”

There’d been no prelude. Hickey had knocked softly at the door one carefully chosen afternoon—one of a few fair days, all except for the watch had gone out to play football or watch the match—and presented MacDonald’s book with a little flourish, as though giving a gift rather than return into something borrowed. A quick glance revealed the spine worked further loose from the binding and several pages dog-eared. It reeked of stale tobacco. MacDonald took the book with a funny twinge in his chest—pity, maybe, for the book, and the grimacing guilt of an apology owed—and tossed it onto the bed. Toward Hickey he felt no anger: he’d expected the damage. Then Hickey had stepped into the cramped room, quietly sliding the door closed behind him. Without a word exchanged between them he was sinking to his knees, and now his hands are deftly unfastening MacDonald’s trousers, freeing his prick, and MacDonald can only stand there, jaw set, as Hickey idly strokes him. Dreamily. As though he’s in no hurry. But his pulse against the capillaries of MacDonald’s fingertips say otherwise.

“No,” MacDonald answers. “You just don’t strike me as one to submit without a fight—or a bargain.”

“You call it like you see it, doctor. I like that about you. The fact is, I’m fond of you—and this great big prick of yours.” Then, as though to show how much he means it, he gives the tip a little open mouth kiss, twisting his tongue around it and finishing with a sharp, light nip to the foreskin. 

“Jesus,” MacDonald says faintly. Then, warmly genial, “Are you sure you’re not simply fond of sucking cock?” He cups Hickey’s chin. “The circumstances being what they are—you on your knees without so much as a hello—well, it begs the question, truly—are you a slut, Mr. Hickey?” 

“That’s an uncharitable thing to suggest, especially to a man in a position to bite your cock clean off. Had we met in an alley I might’ve.”

“Lucky we’re on a ship, then.”

“Anyway,” Hickey shrugs, “one doesn’t preclude the other, I should think.” He gazes searchingly at MacDonald. “But that’s the thing about young men, isn’t it? You just don’t know. Our hearts are so fickle, they say. They even write ballads about it.” His voice is raw, seemingly sincere, yet the words themselves are obscurely teasing. “‘Silver Dagger’, doctor MacDonald—do you know the one? 

_My daddy was a handsome devil  
with a chain five miles long,  
on each link a heart does dangle  
of another maid he’s loved and wronged..._

Hickey’s voice is harsh and low and MacDonald senses, not for the first time, a total derangement somewhere in Hickey’s soul: a madness indulgently nursed, hidden away. Like a dagger tucked in a boot. 

“It’s a fine song, aye, for singing in taverns and the like,” MacDonald says with his usual polished geniality. “But your heart, fickle or wronged or whatnot, is no concern of mine. Only, at this moment, that pretty mouth of yours. Open up, now... there’s a good lad.” He presses his thumb against Hickey’s lower lip.

“Clean off,” Hickey reminds him. “At the root.” He darts forward and bites the pad of MacDonald’s thumb, hard enough to smart. MacDonald steps back and refastens his fly. 

“You overestimate your pull with me, brat,” he says, tasting in each word of this lie the memory of Hickey’s mouth.

Hickey rises to his feet, his shoulders thrown back from his chest and chin jutted obstinately forward. His eyes flash, dark with lust and fury at once, and he’s breathing hard. “Call me brat again and I will gut you where you stand,” he says, Small as he is, he radiates danger in that moment, rage—MacDonald nearly shrinks back. Nearly. But he’s always been particularly stiff of nerve, and knows that to falter now would be to reverse whatever warped magnetism it is that draws them together. 

So he stands at ease, holding Hickey’s bristling gaze with his own placid one. When he speaks, his voice is measured, cool. “You bit _me_ lad, and now have the gall to be offended when I call you what you are?” Hickey goes to lunge at him, a felid’s lunge, with all the strength uncoiling from the thighs, but MacDonald senses it in time and aborts it by raising his arm and stepping to the side. Hickey crashes onto the mattress chest first.

The only sign of the spike in MacDonald’s adrenaline is a series of minute movements beneath the flesh of his jaw and a measured, deep exhalation. In truth, he’d been terrified but Hickey looks so small now, turned onto his side and trying to rise, rattled by the steep tumble. He eyes MacDonald venomously as though he was the one who’d pushed him down. But MacDonald only leans over him, his weight pouring through his palm on Hickey’s sternum as he pushes him onto his back and swings his long legs astride him. His hands he pins to his side with his knees.

“Lad, I don’t know what you want from me,” he begins, leaning down so his voice is extremely low, and his breath hot, in Hickey’s ear. “But I do know what I want from you. It’s rather uncomplicated, actually: I want you to be a good lad. Behave as a good lad should.” He strokes Hickey’s hair back behind his ears. He’s breathing hard, MacDonald notices, though he’s trying to hide it, and that breath unfurls into a harsh little moan as MacDonald drags his haunch lightly along the length of Hickey’s half-hard prick. “You’re a capable lad,” he continues, “and a clever one. If you prove yourself good too, I will be good to you in turn.” 

Hickey eyes him for a moment, then grins crookedly. “You ought to be afraid of me, doctor.”

“Why?” _I am, and it’s sublime_ , MacDonald could say instead, but he senses something in Hickey at this moment, a vulnerability, and he wishes to pursue it.

Hickey’s grin widens but his eyes are nakedly sad. “I might eat you alive.”

MacDonald contemplates this for a moment. From any other man’s lips, it would be an outlandish boast or a fumbled come-on. But from Hickey, he knows, it is a simple confession. No more, no less. “I’m not afraid,” he lies. “Now, will you be good for me?” Then he leans down and kisses him once, twice, thrice softly on the lips before he parts his small, sharp teeth and lets him in. 

It is not like last time. It’s no gentler, no sweeter, but this time it is Hickey who yields and MacDonald who, though trembling inwardly, seizes. After some time, MacDonald breaks away. “I’m going to mark you up, lad,” he says. 

“Last time the bruises stayed for a month,” Hickey says.

“Anemia, perhaps,” MacDonald says. “Not uncommon among sailors. Do you mind it?”

“I rather fancy it,” Hickey smirks. 

Soon Hickey’s wrists are crossed behind the small of his back, tucked beneath his own weight, and his shirt’s torn open. He’s writhing and making all sorts of decidedly undignified sounds under MacDonald’s mouth. Hickey, for all his posturing at toughness, is an exquisitely sensitive, vocal recipient of such attentions. He has this way of pitching his voice high and trembling when MacDonald seizes on a particularly tender spot, such as the finger’s width of flesh above the padded jut of his hipbone—a panting, feral keening. It reverberates in MacDonald’s blood and it is not long until he is strainingly, painfully erect against the seam of his trousers. In fact, he can’t recall if he’s ever been so electrified, so ready—except perhaps during Hickey’s last visit. 

Suddenly, Hickey’s hands dart down to scrabble at his own fly. “Hands down,” MacDonald says, “until I say.” Then he leans down again and nuzzles his face against the hardened arc of flesh in Hickey’s trousers, then mouths his way down its length. He inhales deeply, hums with satisfaction. Tobacco, sweat, the tartly saline lilt of arousal. “Fuck,” he distantly hears Hickey hiss as a dark spot forms at the tip. “Please.” He raises his eyes to find Hickey staring at him, intent, open-mouthed, eyes dark. It’s not the look of lust in his eyes that makes MacDonald’s breath catch but the vulnerability, the total lack of affectation. 

“Please? Please what?” MacDonald arches his eyebrows and chuckles.

Hickey’s tongue flicks out to wet his lips; his brows are slightly furrowed. His gaze falters. “I still want to suck your cock,” he says softly. 

Wordlessly, MacDonald rises and Hickey kneels before him. “Good lad,” MacDonald murmurs, stroking Hickey’s jaw, the stretched flesh of his cheek as he opens his mouth wide. “Such a good lad.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings apply - please see end notes.

Had McDonald known earlier what Hickey could do with his mouth, he’d have been begging for it from the very start. He does not, of course, tell Hickey this, but no matter—he knows. He must. By the way his thighs tremble, by the helpless way he curls and loosens his fingers in Hickey’s greasy hair. Normally McDonald is a quiet and deliberate lover, from whom each expression of pleasure must be won like a prize, but Hickey undams a river of whimpering, invective, scatterings of astonished praise. The first time he tries to override his grip and thrust into his mouth, Hickey seizes a bit of the flesh of his hip between thumb and forefinger and viciously twists. In reprisal, McDonald gives Hickey’s hair a stiff tug, levering him off his prick to gaze sternly down at him. 

“None of that, lad,” he warns, but Hickey only grins and swallows him whole in one elegant glide. The bruises linger for weeks. 

He visits again a few nights later, then again a few nights after that. Soon the visits are spaced out a little more, but play out the same way: rough kissing, touching, teasing, then Hickey goes onto his knees for him. He invariably refuses reciprocation in kind, preferring to lazily finish himself off in McDonald’s bunk as McDonald watches. Some nights, though, he doesn’t want anything: he nudges his way into McDonald’s arms and lies there stiffly, as though unaccustomed to being held. Sometimes they talk: aimless, surprisingly amiable conversation; Hickey is well-read and sharp-witted, casting out barbed little judgments on most aboard the ship and familiar with the more prominent philosophers and scientists. He deftly evades, however, any questions put to him about himself or his past. 

“What do you want from me?” McDonald asks him one night. 

“What were you lashed for?”

“Oh, now, you’re a smart lad. Surely you can infer it for yourself.”

“I want to hear about it.”

“Maybe some night you’re not playing with yourself.” 

Without a moment’s thought, Hickey wrangles his stiff prick into his trousers, does them up, and gazes at McDonald, brow slightly furrowed. McDonald sighs.

“Please,” Hickey says.

“It’s not fodder for whatever lurid agenda you’re—“

“I want to know about you.”

“That’s capital from you. Forthcoming as an oyster about your own past, you are.”

He shrugs and slouches back provocatively against the head of McDonald’s bunk. His prick’s still hard in his pants, his thighs spread. 

“You want to touch me,” Hickey says in this accusatory, wounded tone. “You dirty old men are all the same—call us _your lad_ , grab at our pricks.”

“No, not really. I got mine already,” McDonald says. “You got me off with that slut mouth of yours, remember?”

“Do you know how many cocks I’ve sucked with this _slut mouth_ , doctor?”

“Hundreds, I’d wager.”

“At the least,” Hickey says pleasantly. “I’ve near twenty years’ experience at it. I see you doing that math—how’s that for a past?” McDonald studies his face: it’s ugly arithmetic for certain, as Hickey’s not a day past thirty. Hickey rocks down onto his hands and knees, his face—cherubic, radiant in the scrubbed, ruddy newness of youth—at prick level. He grins but his eyes are vacant. “Lashings are nothing,” he says, climbing off the bed. He lingers a moment before McDonald, his hand on his hip. “Thought you could use talking about it, is all.” He leaves, his exit as silent as held breath. 

He does not return the next week, nor the week after. When he does finally return, something is different. He slides past McDonald and sits on the bed, his elbows on his knees.

“Don’t you want to know where I’ve been?”

“I’m pleased you’re here now.”

“So you missed me.”

McDonald studies him. He could say, _I missed your mouth, and all the pretty tricks you do with it._ He could say, _I missed the wiry wildfire blaze of you in my arms._ Or, _Your eyes in the low light, talking afterwards, the scent of tobacco you leave in my bed. An earthen sweetness._ For he’s astonished to realize in that moment that he’s missed him terribly, and wants him now to stay. Not just bring him off, but _stay_. All night, stay. Return tomorrow, and stay. And so, perverse as his will is, and paralyzed by the smaller man’s shrewd and impatient gaze, he shrugs. Smiles. “I’m pleased you’re here now,” he repeats.

“And would you fuck me if I wanted you to?”

“You know I would. But I might have preferred the opportunity to seduce you.”

“Oh, I can’t bear that.” He opens his arms and pulls McDonald to him, leaning his head against his hip. “I’ve done a bit of it recently and it’s tiresome.” 

“Oh? Does this explain why you didn’t come?”

“You’re not jealous, doctor?”

He shrugs, smiles. “Curious who,” he says. 

“Billy Gibson,” Hickey answers, a trace too triumphantly, as though that wafer-thin stork of a steward were any kind of prize.

“You’ve an eye for tall men,” McDonald notes wryly. Jealousy’s a dirty but bracing thing, a touch of which he’s always perversely relished, and now he finds himself wild to claim Hickey. Not the having, but the taking. That’s how it should be with jealousy: it should flare up sharp and singing like a Roman rocket as you seize what’s yours and, once it’s seized, fade. 

“He’s taller than tall,” Hickey says. “And the funny thing is, size he is, he likes me to have him like a dog.” He glances at McDonald, at the arousal he doesn’t bother to hide. “You like hearing about this, doctor? Are you one of those—what do you call them...”

“Cuckold? No. Not in the least,” McDonald says pleasantly. “In fact, I’ve a jealous streak a mile wide, and am contemplating how I’d take you front to front—up against a wall, perhaps—so as to see your face while I fuck every last trace of him out of you.”

“But you don’t love me.”

“Is love part of this, Mr. Hickey?”

Hickey grins, his eyes gleaming, and shrugs. Then he slouches provocatively back against the wall of McDonald’s berth. “If you want me,” he says, “see if you can take me.”

Thirty minutes later, he has Hickey precisely where he wants him: thrusting against his open mouth, his tongue methodically working him open in concert with crooked, probing fingers. But it’s hard won: he’s taken an elbow to the jaw and a bite mark beading blood on his chest and another, shallower, on his forearm. Yet he wouldn’t trade it for the world—the way Hickey’s whimpering through clenched teeth, trying to keep it down, his fists working the blankets.

“Please,” he whines quietly, in response to which McDonald slowly withdraws his tongue so he can twist his fingers further in, stroking his prostrate relentlessly. Hickey’s prick is rose red and dripping and gives a startled little twitch each time his fingers strike home. 

“Goddammit,” Hickey gasps, arching his back. He’s teetering on the fulcrum of sinking against and pulling away, so merciless is the sensation. “Please—“

“Please what?”

“You know what I want.” His voice is caught between scorn and genuine pleading; his pupils are wide and dark.

“I want to hear you say it,” he murmurs, leaning down so his lips brush Hickey’s ear.

“Inside of me, doctor.” It’s more an order than a request, but McDonald expects nothing less. He unceremoniously plucks his fingers out and fishes a little vial of oil out from the drawer beneath his bed.

“Prepared,” Hickey observes contemptuously. 

“Always.” McDonald glances at him, smiling pleasantly, as he slicks a palmful of oil down his jutting length. “On your back, if you would.”

Hickey’s well loosened but nevertheless feels almost punishingly snug around him, like a second layer of his own flesh. He presses in an increment at a time, slow enough that Hickey whines and pulls at him from behind, his long fingers digging into his buttocks. 

“Quit,” he says. “Or you’ll have none at all.”

“I can do without,” Hickey snarls back, but neither of them mean what they say. 

“I’m trying not to hurt you, Cornelius.”

But Hickey only rolls his eyes. “Ever the gentleman,” he sneers.

McDonald fingers a lock of Hickey’s hair, curling it around his finger. “Is that what you’re after, then? To be fucked up against some piss-stained alley wall like the slut you are? Familiar territory, is it?”

“It’s not about what _I’m_ after, doctor. Have me like you’d chosen had we met in an alley—as well we might’ve, no?”

Before he can stop himself, McDonald slaps Hickey across the face and Hickey only grins. “That’s right,” he says, his voice husky and soft. “Again, if you’d like.” He tilts his face up at McDonald, offering his cheek and jaw to the older man’s palm. His eyes glint in the half-dark like a newly-minted scalpel blade.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Frank discussion of past underage sex work as well as treatment of its residual trauma.


End file.
